Microsoft Fails to Stop More Than One Quarter of Viruses

March 5, 2007: Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare has suffered another blow this week, scraping the bottom of the barrel in a comparison of 17 anti-virus packages.

According to independent Austrian antivirus researcher Andreas Cleminti, Windows Vista’s bundled security Live OneCare did not perform well when held up against its peers.

The service and 16 others were tested against hundreds of thousands of worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware, with Live OneCare stopping just 82.4 percent of malicious code. A significant gap compared to other solutions such as Symantec’s Norton antivirus with 96.8 percent, Kaspersky Labs' AV with 97.9 percent and AEC's TrustPort AV WS with 99.4 percent.

The top prize was taken out by G Data Security's AntiVirusKit (AVK), which successfully stopped 99.5 percent of all malware in its tracks.

While the detection rate is not the be all and end all of virus protection, the results do not paint a particularly rosy picture for Microsoft’s new solution.

This is not the first hit to Live OneCare’s credibility either, as last week Australia’s PC Tool announced some new research that showed Microsoft’s anti-spyware tool Windows Defender picking up only around 50 percent of spyware.

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